State insurance regulators are wishing they had more information about how three major Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) will really affect insurers’ finances.
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Regulators in many states have already approved 2016 rates, but they still do not know how much specific insurers will get from, or pay into, the PPACA “three R’s” programs.
See also: Feds question insurers’ PPACA aid program filings
Members of the Health Reform Solvency Impact Subgroup and the Health Care Reform Actuarial Working Group, parts of the National Association of Insurance Commissioners (NAIC), have been talking about the three R’s data lag during conference calls, according to copies of call minutes included in NAIC summer meeting packets.
Regulators on the panels have been looking into adding a state-by-state three R’s table to the Supplemental Health Care Exhibit (SHCE) Part 1. The SHCE is part of the “blank,” or collection of forms, a health insurer must fill out when it sends its annual statement to insurance regulators.
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) already requires health insurers to send it three R’s information using a risk corridors and medical loss ratio (MLR) report filing system. The NAIC has also added a form to the annual statement blank that a health insurer is supposed to use to estimate the possible effect that inaccurate three R’s forecasts could have on its risk-based capital (RBC) level.
An RBC level is a measure regulators use to determine if an insurer seems to have enough capital to support the policies it has sold.
Kevin Dyke, a Michigan regulator, said during a conference call in May that regulators would like to add a three R’s table of their own to the 2016 blank because they were not sure how, or when, they’d get the HHS three R’s data.